Spoleto honors Menotti's 100th birthday

Nigel Redden, the general director of the Spoleto Festival USA, poses in Charleston, S.C., in this picture taken on May 19, 2011. The festival, opening May 27, is honoring founder Gian Carlo Menotti with a production of Menotti's opera "The Medium" on the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth. (AP Photo/Bruce Smith)

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHARLESTON — The Spoleto Festival USA opens its 35th season this week paying homage to festival founder Gian Carlo Menotti on the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

One of three operas during the new season is Menotti’s “The Medium.” It will be the first time the festival has staged a Menotti opera since the composer left 18 years ago in a dispute over his successor. He died in 2007 at age 95, still estranged from the festival he founded here.

“It seemed if not now, then when? It seemed appropriate,” said festival General Director Nigel Redden.

“It would be disingenuous of me to say I didn’t have mixed feelings,” added Redden, who left the festival, along with some board members, after a 1991 dispute with Menotti. Redden was brought back to Spoleto after Menotti left.

Menotti started the Charleston festival in 1977 as a companion to the arts festival he started in Spoleto, Italy, almost two decades earlier.

“There were times when I didn’t get on with Gian Carlo but there were a lot of times when I did. Gian Carlo changed my life and he changed the lives of others,” said Redden, who has a portrait of the composer in his office in the 18th Century building that houses the Spoleto headquarters.

Menotti also changed Charleston. The festival sparked a rebirth of the arts in the city at the same time the downtown area underwent a renaissance. A quiet street near the Spoleto headquarters is now named for the composer.

“He was an extraordinary impresario,” Redden said. “He was the most charming man you could find and he also could be difficult. He was a larger than life character.”

This year’s festival opens Friday with the traditional brass fanfare and speeches on the steps of Charleston City Hall.

It continues through June 12 with a program including the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Emilie” as well as a production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute,” conducted by Spoleto’s former music director Steven Sloane.

Among other events, Spoleto includes the Australian circus “Circa” with its dancing, acrobatics and cheeky humor. Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips blend indie-pop music with large video projections of Andy Warhol’s silent-film portraits in “13 Most Beautiful... Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.”

Although commemorations marking the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War were held in Charleston last month, there are no Spoleto performances noting the war.

“Because so much was going to be focused in April it seemed that we were going to be an afterthought by the time May rolled around,” Redden said. He added that the festival is thinking about events in 2015 to mark the anniversary of the end of the war and the reunification of the nation.

It’s also an important year for the festival because a planned $142 million makeover of the city’s Gaillard Municipal Auditorium is expected to be finished. The venue is used yearly by Spoleto.

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